How's that for a provocative title? MWAHAHA! (Mothers, shield your children's sensitive eyes).
Columbus blows into town with the cold weather tonight, hot on the heels of a 5-2 spanking at the hands of the NW Division basement-dwelling Oilers. I watched most of that game and the Blue Jackets are still a pretty bad team, despite winning 4 in a row before falling to the Oil. Rick Nash and Nikolai Zherdev were almost always completely irrevelant whenever they stepped on the ice. In fact, the best players for the BJ's in Edmonton seemed to be their 3rd/4th liners - ie; Chimera, Fritsche, Malholtra. And that almost always spells "disaster", especially when you have Ty Conklin in net.
Tonight's "Big Flames News!" is, of course, the return of Jarome Iginla. Although he's been gone for about month, Iggy still leads the team in scoring with 53 points. Which is more a credit to the kind of year he was having pre-sprain than an indictment of the rest of his teammates. In fact, Calgary did pretty well in the absence of their Captain, going 7-2-2. Also, it's rumored that Craig Conroy will be joining Iginla and Tanguay on the top unit tonight, with Tyler Moss garnering 2nd line duty with Juice and Langkow. Matt sums up some of my feelings on these combinations here. He also points out that it's unlikely that the Conny/Tanger/Iggy trio will remain intact the whole contest, which is probably accurate. If Conroy starts to buckle under increased defensive attention and icetime, expect to see Langkow pulling some tours of duty alongside Iginla as the game wears on.
As an aside, I'd personally like to see Lombardi put in a good performance tonight and be rewarded with some icetime. He got exactrly zero minutes on the PK last game, for example, no doubt owing to a combination of Conroy's emotional return and his own utterly mediocre performance. However, since he's proven to be positively deadly with a man down this season, I would prefer to see him getting some primo PK minutes, performance permitting of course.
Finally, besides the obvious Calgary victory, I'd also like to see some semi-competent PK from the team as a whole tonight. You know - winning defensive zone face-offs, blocking shots, boxing out opponents down-low. The blocking shots thing in particular seems to be a big area of concern for the Flames. Up until recently, I'd only had a "hunch" that Calgary was not excelling at this defensive aspect of the game. Then I looked at the stats and found my hunch was correct. The Flames have 5 players that have blocked 50 or more shots thus far (none of which are forwards), the best being Roman Hamrlik at 70. In contrast, the Oilers (who are fantastic at BS) have 4 players that have blocked 70 or more shots and one hovering just below 60. Their two top shot-blockers, Jason Smith (143) and Steve Staios (114) have stopped more pucks than the Flame's top 4 guys combined.
Whether born of a psychological issue (Kipper'll stop it!) or systemic impairment (overly passive penalty-kill system) I think the Flames need to find a way to consistently get into the shooting lanes of opposition blueliners when a man down. I noticed during the stomach-punch loss to Chicago in paticular that 'Hawks defenseman seemed to have 10 feet and 15 minutes to make a decision while 5on4. And if or when they did decide to take a shot, there was nary a Flames forward close enough to dissuade them or at least make the chances of the pucking hitting the net a lot slimmer. What's especially annoying about this penchant for shoddy shot-blocking is the fact that Calgary actually excelled at it during the hallowed 03/04 season. Hell Shot-blocking, goaltending and icing the puck basically got Calgary into the play-offs that season.
Crappy PK aside, I think the Flames will take this one. Conklin isn't any good and neither is his team. Iginla's back and the Flames are the best team in the NHL at home.
Let's go with a 3-1 Calgary victory. Juice, Iginla and Amonte for Calgary. Malholtra for Columbus.
GO FLAMES!
